The North Oregon Coast

The Clatsop met the Lewis and Clark party at the mouth of the Columbia in November 1805, and came to trade almost daily through the wet winter the expedition spent at Fort Clatsop, the log post it built across Youngs Bay and named for its neighbors. In 1811 John Jacob Astor's Pacific Fur Company raised Fort Astoria on the south shore, the first permanent American settlement west of the Rockies. The company sold out to the British within two years, but the name held, and Astoria is the oldest city in Oregon — cannery-era houses stacked up its hillside, the four-mile bridge to Washington crossing the river below.

US-101 holds to the shore from here for the length of the state, and the beaches it passes are public. After a Cannon Beach motel claimed the dry sand in front of it as private, Governor Tom McCall pushed the Beach Bill through the legislature in 1967, recognizing the public's right to the beach all the way up to the line of vegetation.

South of Tillamook Head the coast was the country of the Tillamook, the Alsea, the Siuslaw and their neighbors. In 1855 an executive order set aside more than a million acres along it as the Coast Reservation, and in the years that followed bands from across western Oregon and beyond, survivors of the Rogue River war among them, were moved onto it. The government cut it down for a century and terminated the tribes outright in 1954. In 1977 the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, a confederation of twenty-seven bands, became the second terminated tribe in the nation to win back federal recognition. They govern from Siletz, up the river from Lincoln City.

What to See in The North Oregon Coast

6 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Geology & Rock Formations

Haystack Rock

Cannon Beach

A 235-foot sea stack made of lava that ran down the Columbia from the far side of the state, now a nesting rock for tufted puffins.

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Natural Areas

Depoe Bay

Depoe Bay

A six-acre harbor reached through a crack in the basalt, on land allotted in 1894 to a Tututni man the agency knew as Depot Charley.

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Yaquina Head

Newport

A basalt headland with Oregon's tallest lighthouse at the tip and, on its south side, an old quarry the sea was let back into.

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Historic Sites

Fort Clatsop

Astoria

The log post the Corps of Discovery named for its neighbors, and left to the Clatsop headman Coboway five days after stealing one of his people's canoes.

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Architecture

Astoria Column

Astoria

A railroad's 1926 monument to its own route, wrapped in a 525-foot spiral of Oregon history that ends with the train pulling into Astoria.

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Food & Drink

Tillamook Creamery

Tillamook

A farmer-owned cheese plant that exists because Tillamook Bay had no good way out, and whose logo is the schooner the settlers built to make one.

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Scenic Drives through The North Oregon Coast

Stories from The North Oregon Coast

The North Oregon Coast rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.